An English student of Italian literature has been at great pains to
investigate Mr. William Shakspeare’s indebtedness for his plots and
backgrounds to the Italian novelists. He publishes the result of his
studies in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and it is an article all students
of literature will want to read. It reveals the fine audacity of Mr.
Shakspeare, and shows how the world of readers gains when great genius
takes its own where it finds it.
These Italian novelists were fine workmen, and ingenious story tellers,
but Shakspeare clothed their creations in the flesh and blood of
perennial humanity. They made the puppets of passion, true to the
fashions and humors of their day, and invaluable as such; Shakspeare took
them and gave them that philosophy and humanity that rings true through
all the changes of custom, and knowledge and philosophy.
These writers had the faculty of invention, of incident and situation,
and dramatic movement and climax. Shakspeare may have really lacked these
ingenious faculties of mind, but yet he had the dramatic perception of
life—the whole of life, quick and stirring, all emotion and thought and
passion. In his day the play was the thing in England, and he needed a
strong current of human action to show the soul of life on the stage as
he saw it in the commonplaces of everyday existence. So he borrowed from
the Italians, who supplied him with the very plots he needed to develop
his own philosophy of life, in a fashion that gave thought its real place
in life, as a concrete force on a level with action.
If the novel had been established in England earlier, if the English
writers had borrowed the form of the novel from the Italians bodily,
instead of their plots, Shakspeare might have been our psychological
novelist; for it seems that his dramatic power was of the deeper sort
that seizes the heart and soul of life, rather than that which devises
effective scenes and climaxes. That is, if this English writer is to be
trusted, and he seems to write with authority. He says _Cymbeline_ and
_All’s Well That Ends Well_ were taken from Boccaccio’s _Decameron_, _The
Merchant of Venice_ and _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ from Florentino’s
_Pecarone_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, _Two Gentlemen
of Verona_ and _Twelfth Night_ from Bandello, and _Measure for Measure_
and _Othello_ from Giraldi’s _Ecatommiti_.
If any contemporary writer put himself in such indebtedness the critics
would probably howl. And yet the richest imaginations, the most fantastic
fancy, the keenest wit and widest comprehension of human nature and life
is often given to a writer who is destitute of the mere dramatic knack
of improvising a story to carry on the frame of life as he knows and sees
it.
Half our so-called creative and imaginative writers of today are merely
ingenious plot and puppet makers, with no real gift of creation or
imagination at all. The exceptions in English are Meredith, Hardy,
Zangwill, Gissing and a baker’s dozen or so others. The man of real
imaginative gifts, and the philosophic insight that invariably
accompanies them, is seldom recognized in his true office and capacity;
for he so often lacks the melodramatic and theatrical ingenuity, that
perverts the course of human destiny for mere effectiveness. Since the
deeper things of existence are usually excluded from fiction it is ten
to one he is writing criticism or essays, and is thought to be prosy and
dull by the majority of readers, to whom imaginative writing means simply
the romance of abducted duchesses and bloody encounters by moonlight. But
creation, as Emerson pointed out long ago, is _insight_.
A gory era is at this hour upon us. Let us hope that the true imaginative
literature of insight, philosophy, poetry and analysis of character
will yet emerge, when Ibsen and Maeterlinck and Sudermann and the rest
are relieved by process of time of the stigma attached to all original
observers, thinkers and innovators.
Shakespeare, if he were alive today, would be in the forefront of this
new movement for freedom in literature, and he would steal right and left
from Science!